The election of a know-nothing fascist clown to the U.S. presidency, ushering in what threatens to be a reactionary era of overt white supremacy while simultaneously placing his frightening clown-child-fingers next to nuclear-launch buttons?

The internet is awash in trailers, and studios don’t help by dripping out details, arriving eventually at the ludicrous end-game of the trailer-for-a-trailer. We’ve all been rooked by this. One unfortunate consequence is the heightening of expectations, and our weird desire to see those expectations undermined.

Quality horror films rarely make a huge amount at the box office, at least since the grindhouse days. Word-of-mouth only counts for so much, and many movies we now recognize as genre classics have had to wait for their cult followings.

For the near-entirety of its 80 minute running time, Blue Jay is a resolutely understated affair, more interested in partially-concealed longing and lingering, unspoken hurt than emotional fireworks.

Alex Lehman‘s character study comes pretty close to blowing this tone in its final moments, as we’re treated to outbursts we didn’t ask for and the film doesn’t need, but up until that point, it’s a lovely portrait of two people navigating their shared pasts and conflicted presents.

Antonia Bird’s film Ravenous is a number of things. It’s a horror, and a comedy, and an odd collision of vampire and cannibal tropes, and a frontier narrative. It’s also a vegan, feminist, and anti-colonial attack on mythologies of masculinist virility.

Moonlight is a genuine cinematic event. It’s the best movie of the year.

This is starting to seem like received wisdom, as Moonlight picks up awards and accolades. Good. Barry Jenkins’ film is a rebuke — the tenderest imaginable — to normative assumptions about who should be on screen, and why, and how those stories should unfold.

The tradition of updating Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book every 25 years or so continued in 2016, with Jon Favreau’s very beautiful, decidedly dark and tense take on the story, new to Netflix this week. Although Bill Murray gets some laughs as Baloo and belts out “Bare Necessities”, this Jungle Book mostly finds the young Mowgli in crouched peril or running for his life, which allows for lots of impressive set-pieces but also begs the question who this thing is supposed to be for.